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Mirror of Sanity – Why Bad Relationships Make Us Crazy

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ~ Douglas Coupland

I’ve been having a bit of a blip for the last week in terms of my mental health. I haven’t being doing so good and had to have the crisis team out last Wednesday. I think it’s because I’ve spent a lot of time alone lately, so there hasn’t been anyone around to stabilise me and keep me sane.

This has led me to spend a lot of time thinking about how much I need other people to model sanity for me; and how badly I do when there’s nobody there to be that model for me, or when the people who are there just project more crazy back at me. For example, the beginning of this current depressive episode coincided with me spending a lot of time and energy on a guy who repeatedly failed to be honest with me.

And I realised something that I possibly ought to have learned a lot earlier.

Craziness is essentially the inability of the mind to separate what’s real from what isn’t. Be that through hearing voices in your head, suffering hallucinations or being unable to accurately assess risk in any given situation.

This means that in relationships with other people who we’re supposed to be able to trust, or at the very least want to be able to believe, we can leave ourselves quite vulnerable to craziness.

If the other person in the relationship is unreliable or dishonest, particularly if they are frequently so, we can find ourselves struggling to sort the facts of the situation, from the fiction of what we’re being told. In effect they make us crazy.

And when people feel that way they panic, and do silly things to try and get their sense of stability back.

It’s no coincidence that the men who believe that all women are crazy are the men who are least likely to be straight with the woman they’re with.

So next time you feel that somebody you’re close too is acting kinda loca, you might want to consider first of all whether you’ve given them all the information they need to understand the reality of the situation you’re in. You might just find that it’s you who made them that way.

Amen to this! I’ve been struggling with my identity within a relationship I’d fought tooth and nail to have in the first place. I’ve found him to be unreliable and it’s been driving me bonkers. But now that he has had time to settle in, I find that he is trying and my own brain just can’t quite trust it. Maybe in time we will balance out, but it’s nice to hear that I am not alone in this. Thanks.

Sorry to hear you’re in a slump… I know first hand that too much solitude can tend to push us in the wrong direction sometimes. On a lighter note, how’s the a-hole triage coming along? haha I wish there was an antedote to a-hole neighbours!!!

Thanks.
I’m being completely ruthless, cutting them all out completely. I don’t think other people know quite what to make of it. But it has to be done, I want to give myself the best chance of getting better.
It’s a shame about the neighbours though. Not so much you can do about them.

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